Already missed one…

I’m terrible…I already missed a week with this blog and I am truly sorry about that. I don’t quite know how you managed to survive without it but I hope none of you died because of my forgetfulness. Not a whole lot has happened in the past two weeks. Two weeks ago I was still in the field, we didn’t get out until Saturday night at around 8ish I think. Funny story though, we were told that we’d have a late call on monday only if nobody got a DUI over the super short weekend that we had left (saturday night, sunday). It got to be 11:30pm Sunday evening and I was just relaxing in my room watching some hulu when my phone went, “baboobadobadedo…bing!” To my terror it was my boss man telling me some retard got a DUI that very night and we had PT as usual the next day. That meant instead of me getting 8 hours of sleep that night I would have to wake up at 5:30am. By the time I got to bed it was about 12:30 so I wasn’t too thrilled waking up that morning. Oh well though, for some reason I had a good attitude about it and the day went fine. We didn’t even do PT that morning, we did a lovely urinalysis instead.

I finally got my paperwork turned in to JAG for my motorcycle. Incase you don’t know what happened here’s the gist of it. A friend and I rented a motorcycle trailer from MWR(an army thing) and en route to point b my bike fell off and got lots of boo-boos. The reason it fell of was easy to figure out; the eye bolt that was holding my ratchet strap completely straitened out which caused the ratchet strap to let go of the bike and down it went. The MWR people deny any responsibility and say it’s my friend’s insurance that will cover it since it was his truck pulling the trailer. I only had liability on the bike, in hindsight of course I should’ve gotten full coverage. So I turned in all the documents needed to JAG and hopefully they will see it was MWR’s fault and not mine. That’s all that’s happening right now!

Week one in the field

This past week in the field has been pretty nice. Mostly because our higher ups aren’t there to get in our way. It was pretty funny, we got setup quicker than we ever have because it was just us “lowly” people there with no interference from the higher ups. Anywho my job went pretty smoothly, just the normal issues coming up like our tunnels randomly going down. A “tunnel” is the communication link between point A and point B. So when it goes down no communications get passed through so it’s something that has to be resolved quickly! Other than that not much has happened, I got a TON of reading done throughout the days. We got out on Friday but I had a guard shift Saturday from 10pm to 2pm Sunday. Here’s me telling the satellite dish where to aim, that’s how we do it for real:

Here’s a video of some PT done in the field…not really:

That’s it for now. I’ll update next week once this field event is finished.

Once a week

I’ve recently been getting emails reminding me about my domain name and how it’s going to automatically renew itself which got me thinking; maybe I should actually use it! For the time being I need to post a little something each week about what’s going on in my glorious army life. This little blog’s main purpose is to educate you on what’s going on with me. I know, really exciting right?

RANDOM: Something I can rejoice about in my newly established blog is the kindle update! As of late Amazon released a few new kindle models along with came an update for the kindle keyboard (previously known as the kindle 3). So now I can actually see a page number in the books I’m reading!!! That was one of my biggest complaints and it’s now fixed. I’ll need to see what the other updates are because I’m sure they’re worth using. Something about borrowing books from libraries I read somewhere, I must investigate.

ARMY: Starting this monday my brigade (1st brigade, 82nd airborne) will be doing a big field exercise. I’ve heard it’ll be 3 weeks but just today I heard rumor of it being cut to 2 weeks, let’s hope and pray for the latter. My job will be the same as it always is in the field. Set up my big ol’ satellite dish and distribute the internet to our big ol’ tent. In more fancy terms I’ll set up my STT(Satellite Transportable Terminal) which means establishing a link with a satellite, then sending that signal to my CPN(Command Post Node) cases where it’ll be sent through a bunch of firewalls and other htings and ultimately the switches on both NIPR(Non-secure Internet Protocol Router) and SIPR(Secure Internet Protocol Router) which then sends it off to the TOC(Tactical Operation Center) where the commander and anyone else who needs it can access the internet and use the VOIP phones I set up. It’s a pretty chill job once I’m all set up. I just sit around and wait for something to happen which it always does, then I spring into action like a ninja and fix it! In my free time while “in the field” I read my kindle, it’s a great time to catch up on reading. This time it won’t be hot (the last field exercise was late July/early August) so I’ll be able to enjoy it more.

Not bad for a post, if it was too long please let me know with a comment or a text if you know me that well. I’m pretty sure anybody that’s subscribed to this knows me “that well” because I’m no famous person….yet!

Snow/Freezing Stuff=No work!

Christmas break was awesome! I was home for about 20 days and did tons of stuff with all sorts of people, people I like of course. Of course I went geocaching but not just once. I went with my mom and also Aaron and Lindsay which they just started doing while I was home. They definitely seem to like it and even wrote a bit about it in their blog. At a particular geocache there’s this amazing view of the Susquehanna River, at first it looks dangerous getting to the spot but once you’re standing there you realize it’s not so bad. The bridge in the photo is the Rockville Bridge. It’s pretty cool seeing trains go across it from this vantage point, oh and one more thing about the picture. Just to the left of the bridge you can see a little island, a little more left of that island and you can see a little box thing in the river. That’s the two railroad cars that fell off recently due to high winds, just thought you’d like to know. Ugh, just click that question mark thing. I guess the picture’s too wide to be displayed on this page but if you click that thing it will show up!

So anyways I got back to base on the 4th, worked for the next two days and then we had “off” that Friday to make for a good 3 day weekend. WRONG! I got a call at around 7:00pm Thursday night saying I had to come into work at 7:45am the next morning. I had to clue what for but when I arrived, along with the entire squadron (about 400ish people) we were told that a very expensive piece of equipment went missing. It’s called a Vector and apparently it costs around 20 grand! So we were all sent to different places to look for the thing. After lunch time they deemed it to be stolen since nobody found it. That’s when the fun began, we had numerous “amnesty” periods where naturally no information came up about where the thing might be. We missed and had NO opportunity to eat either breakfast of lunch that day but we did get to eat dinner. I definitely over-ate but on purpose since we were told we’d be spending the night in the troop buildling and possibly all weekend (it’s happened before so they weren’t bluffing) Long story short, everybody nearly froze to death at one point standing outside for 2 hours in crazy coldness during one of the amnesty periods. This particular one was the entire squadron lined up single file and went inside one at a time to write something on a piece of paper and put it into a box to be read later. Everybody had to go through, this took about 2 hours…soooo cold. After dinner we were told to be back at the troop building ready to spend the night and possibly the weekend. So I went to my room, packed some food and my 1/2 inch sleeping mat, took a nap then went to troop. After “sleeping” for 2 hours we were woken up and told to get in formation outside pronto! During that formation it was passed down to us that our wonderful Lieutenant Colonel and Sergeant Major (not kidding on the wonderful part) were releasing us for the weekend! So yay, I got to sleep in my bed that night! Still no word on the missing fancy binoculars. Here’s a pic of what caused all this hoopla.

Yesterday I went into work but then we were released for the day due to the terrible weather we were getting. Snow and freezing stuff that they knew would strand anybody that had to get off base. So we had the day off! Later in the day I got a text saying we also had Tuesday off! So I like to think that God did that to make up for Fridays shenanigans. That’s all that’s been going down in my life recently. Farewell!